A Sentient Land: Aesthetic Alliances with Forests, Beetles, Salt, and Air
January 21, 2026 @ 12:00 pm – March 28, 2026 @ 6:00 pm
Nelly-Eve Rajotte, Les arbres communiquent entre eux à 220 hertz, 2024. Video installation: 3-channel 4K video, colour, generative sound, 25 min; modular synthesizer, electrodes, and tree. VFX artist and software developer: Codrin-Mihail Tablan Negrei. Courtesy of the artist.
A Sentient Land: Aesthetic Alliances with Forests, Beetles, Salt, and Air, a four-person exhibition featuring works made through innovative intersections of science, aesthetics, and spirituality.
Artists Margaux Crump, Julia Krupa, Eileen Ryan, and Nelly-Eve Rajotte realize the potential of communicating directly and sharing authorship with the materials they use to make their art. Their artistic practices are intuitive and collaborative, enabling trees, stones, salt, and air, among other materials, to inform the creative process and the resulting potential meanings. Their methods include a cloud chamber, oral history, bio-sonification, LIDAR scanning, fumage, and saining.
The resulting works of art forge stronger interspecies connections and increased empathy and hope for the future. These innovative modes of working also raise questions: do the artists translate on behalf of the materials? How do speculation and anthropomorphism fit into these explorations of restoration, time, and scale? The four immersive installations engage viewers in dynamic aesthetic experiences that may linger beyond the gallery as a shift in perspective.
Curated by Shana Dumont Garr
Exhibition catalogue featuring essays by Shana Dumont Garr, Doctoral Candidate, Jennifer Hall, Ph.D., and Martina Tanga, Ph.D.
